The essay
- Key People:
- Wole Soyinka
- Don Juan Manuel
In modern literatures, the category of nonfictional prose that probably ranks as the most important both in the quantity and in the quality of its practitioners is the essay.
Modern origins
Before the word itself was coined in the 16th century by Montaigne and Bacon, what came to be called an essay was called a treatise, and its attempt to treat a serious theme with consistency deprived it of the seductive charm relished in the later examples of that form of literature. In this sense, the word “essay” would hardly fit the didactic tone of Aristotle’s Rhetoric or his Metaphysics. There were, however, ancient masters of an early form of the essay, such as Cicero discoursing on the pleasantness of old age or on the art of “divination”; Seneca, on anger or clemency; and Plutarch, more superficially and casually, on the passing of oracles. The relentless desire to analyze one’s own contradictions, especially among Christians, who, like Saint Paul, were aware of their duality and of “doing the evil which they would not,” also contributed to the emergence of the essay. But Christian writing tended to be highly didactic, as may be seen in the work of Saint Augustine of the 5th century, or of the 12th-century theologian Abélard, or even in the Latin writings on “the solitary life” or on “the scorn of the world” by the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch. Not until the Renaissance, with its increasing assertion of the self, was the flexible and deliberately nonchalant and versatile form of the essay perfected by Montaigne.
Montaigne, who established the term essay, left his mark on almost every essayist who came after him in continental Europe, and perhaps even more in English-speaking countries. Emerson made him one of his six Representative Men along with others of the stature of Plato, Shakespeare, and Goethe. Hazlitt lauded Montaigne’s qualities as precisely those that “we consider in great measure English,” and another English romantic writer, Leigh Hunt, saw him as “the first man who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man.” And the 20th-century poet T.S. Eliot declared him to be the most important writer to study for an insight into the literature of France. With Montaigne, the essay achieved for the first time what it can achieve better than any other form of writing, except perhaps the epistolary one: a means of self-discovery. It gave the writer a way of reaching the secret springs of his behaviour, of seizing the man and the author at once in his contradictions, in his profound disunity, and in his mobility. The essay was symbolic of man’s new attitude toward himself, revelling in change, and hence in growth, and forsaking his age-old dream of achieving an underlying steadfastness that might make him invulnerable and similar to the gods. Now he set out to accept himself whole, with his body and his physical and behavioural peculiarities, and thereby repudiate medieval asceticism. He would portray his foibles and unworthiness, hoping to rise above his own mediocrity, or, at the other extreme, he would exalt himself in the hope that he might become the man he depicted. Montaigne in his essays pursued an ethical purpose, but with no pompousness or rhetoric. He offered an ideal that was adopted by his successors for centuries: perfecting man as a tolerant, undogmatic, urbane social being. But, unlike medieval Christian writers, he would not sacrifice to others the most dearly cherished part of himself. To others he would lend himself, but his personality and his freedom were his own, and his primary duty was to become a wiser human being.
No essayist after Montaigne touched on so many varied aspects of life with such an informal, felicitous, and brilliant style. The later writers who most nearly recall the charm of Montaigne include, in England, Robert Burton, though his whimsicality is more erudite, Sir Thomas Browne, and Laurence Sterne, and in France, with more self-consciousness and pose, André Gide and Jean Cocteau.
Uses of the essay
In the age that followed Montaigne’s, at the beginning of the 17th century, social manners, the cultivation of politeness, and the training of an accomplished gentleman became the theme of many essayists. This theme was first exploited by the Italian Baldassare Castiglione in his Il cortegiano (1528; The Courtier). The influence of the essay and of genres allied to it, such as maxims, portraits, and sketches, proved second to none in molding the behaviour of the cultured classes, first in Italy, then in France, and, through French influence, in most of Europe in the 17th century. Among those who pursued this theme was the 17th-century Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián in his essays on the art of worldly wisdom.
With the advent of a keener political awareness with the age of Enlightenment, in the 18th century, the essay became all-important as the vehicle for a criticism of society and of religion. Because of its flexibility, its brevity, and its potential both for ambiguity and for allusions to current events and conditions, it was an ideal tool for philosophical reformers. The Federalist Papers in America and the tracts of the French Revolutionaries, are among the countless examples of attempts during this period to improve the condition of man through the essay.
The advantage of this form of writing was that it was not required to conform to any unity of tone or to similar strictures assigned to other genres since it was for a long time not even considered a genre. After ponderous apologies for traditional faith failed to repulse the onslaught of deism and atheism, traditionalists of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Burke and Coleridge, abandoned unwieldy dogmatic demonstrations in favour of the short, provocative essay. In the defense of the past, it served as the most potent means of educating the masses. French Catholics, German pietists, and a number of individual English and American authors confided to the essay their dismay at what they saw as modern vulgarity and a breakdown of the coherence of the Western tradition. Essays such as Paul Elmer More’s long series of Shelburne Essays (published between 1904 and 1935), T.S. Eliot’s After Strange Gods (1934) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), and others that attempted to reinterpret and redefine culture, established the genre as the most fitting to express the genteel tradition at odds with the democracy of the new world.
Journalism and provocation
The proliferation of magazines in the United States, and the public’s impatience with painstaking demonstrations and polemics, helped establish the essay just as firmly as a receptacle for robust, humorous common sense, unpretentiously expressed, as in the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94). Creative writers resorted to it to admonish their compatriots when they seemed too selfishly unconcerned by the tragedies of the world. Archibald MacLeish, for instance, did so in A Time to Speak (1941). Lewis Mumford, Allen Tate, and other literary and social critics became crusaders for moral and spiritual reform; others seized upon the essay for scathingly ironical and destructive criticism of their culture: for example, James Gibbons Huneker (1860–1921), an admirer of iconoclasts and of egoists, as he called them, proposed European examples to Americans he deemed to be too complacent and lethargic; and, more vociferously still, H.L. Mencken (1880–1956), a self-appointed foe of prejudices, substituted his own for those he trounced in his contemporaries.
In other new countries, or in cultures acquiring an awareness of their own ambitious identity, the essay became semipolitical, earnestly nationalistic, and often polemical, playful, or bitter. Such essays sometimes succeeded in shaking the elite out of its passivity. In Uruguay, for example, José Enrique Rodó (1872–1917), in an analogy to the characters in Shakespeare’s Tempest, compared what should be the authentic South American to the spirit Ariel, in a work thus entitled, in contrast to the bestial Caliban, representing the materialism of North America. In Canada Olivar Asselin (1874–1937) used the essay to advocate the development of a genuine French-Canadian literature. Among the older cultures of Europe, Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–68), the Italian poet and Nobel laureate, appended critical and hortatory essays to some of his volumes of verse, such as Il falso e vero verde (1956; “The False and True Green”). Other European heirs to this tradition of the essay include Stefan Zweig and Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Austria and Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht in Germany; their sprightly and incisive essays on the arts can be traced to the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
Entertainment
One of the functions of literature is to please and to entertain; and the essay, as it grew into the biggest literary domain of all, did not lose the art of providing escape. Essayists have written with grace on children, on women, on love, on sports, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s collection Virginibus Puerisque (1881), or Willa Cather’s pleasant reflections in Not Under Forty (1936). Ernest Renan (1823–92), one of the most accomplished French masters of the essay, found relief from his philosophical and historical studies in his half-ironical considerations on love, and Anatole France (1844–1924), his disciple, and hosts of others have alternated playful essays with others of high seriousness. Sports, games, and other forms of relaxation have not been so often or so felicitously treated. Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653), however, enjoys the status of a minor classic, and the best of the modern Dutch essayists, Johan Huizinga (1872–1945), has reflected with acuteness on Homo ludens, or man at play. A Frenchman, Jean Prévost (1901–44), who was to die as a hero of the Resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II, opened his career as an essayist with precise and arresting analyses of the Plaisirs des sports (1925). But there are surprisingly few very significant works, except in chapters of novels or in short stories, on the joys of hunting, bullfighting, swimming, or even, since Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s overpraised essay, Physiologie du goût (1825; “The Physiology of Taste”) on gourmet enjoyment of the table.
